BlizzCon Tickets Sold Out in 15 Minutes

OCRegister interviewed Shon Damron, Blizzard’s PR manager, who responded to various questions addressing the Blizzcon tickets online store meltdown. What some fans wondered or theorized ended up being the truth.

Last year, BlizzCon 2007 sold out in three days at a pace of two tickets per minute. This year, BlizzCon 2008 tickets sold out … in 15 minutes with thousands of connections per second pressing ctrl+F5 attempting to get through the cart process. Read the complete interview at the Orange County Register. Thanks, WoWInsider

Q: Can you, meaning Blizzard, be specific as to what technically happened and why do you think the system broke down? Was it outsourced?

Blizzard: The issues that people faced were due to an incredible rush to purchase tickets. Last year we sold about two tickets per minute, selling out in 72 hours, and this year, with 50% more tickets available, we sold out in a combined total of 15 minutes. This meant that thousands of people were trying to purchase tickets at the same time, so some people were not able to get all the way through the purchase process before the tickets had been sold out.